Pedestrian Walking Speed Variation with Width of Stairway in Intercity Railway Stations

Rail network being the economical and fast means of transport, many people in the developing countries like India rely on it. Railway stations acts as transfer hubs for passengers to alight and board trains. Unlike metro stations, where daily commuters are more, pedestrian traffic inside intercity railway station is heterogeneous in respect to attributes like age, gender, trip purpose, luggage etc. Pedestrians access various platforms using facilities passageways, stairways and escalators. Physical dimensions of these facilities play major role in pedestrian flow, comfort and convenience in traversing these infrastructure elements. Pedestrian flow characteristics varies on each of these facilities and causes jams and bottlenecks at their connecting points for pedestrian movement. In this research work, effect of stairway width on pedestrian walking speed is studied and results showed that for a given station characteristics, pedestrian mean walking speed are higher on 3.5m stairway than on 2.0m for pedestrian densities less than 2 ped/m 2 . Pedestrian flow characteristics study on these level changing facilities enables in determining effective width of stairway to be provided for a given width of passageway for uniform flow.